Unlike most of those who emigrated from Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, my grandfather did speak quite a bit about the family he left behind. My father and his brother tended to roll their eyes when my grandfather would get started on the subject, but I was always fascinated, even as a young girl, at the thought of a whole other family in some far off place.

My grandfather, Yehuda Zadak Idelchik (changed to Charles Edelson in the United States), emigrated with his father and older brother Chaim (Uncle Hymie) in 1908 from Puchovichi, Belarus. It was the second trip for my great-grandfather (Alter Shimon), who again returned to Russia after a few years, leaving his two teenage sons alone in New York. It wasn’t until 1923, when he married my grandmother (Miriam Kitaif), that my grandfather had a home of his own, having spent all the interim years as a boarder in the homes of others. The experience was not easy for him, and he apparently missed his family terribly, keeping in touch by mail, especially with his only sister, Elke, who remained in Puchovichi with her parents and younger brother Moshe. The youngest brother, Yochanan (Uncle Eugene), escaped to Palestine to avoid conscription in the czar=s army, finally arriving in New York in 1921. His daughter, Mae, was my father=s only cousin while growing up in New York. We thought of ourselves as a very small family. I was aware that relatives still lived in the Old Country, but if I thought of them, it was of my great-grandparents who had died before I was born and for whom my brother and I were named. Stalin, the Holocaust and the Cold War had made Russia seem like a very distant, very frightening place.

My grandfather had struggled to maintain contact with his parents and siblings over the years, especially after Stalin=s rise to power in the late 1920s. At one point in the 1930s, they wrote to say that no more letters or packages should be sent from America, because it was too dangerous for them to receive anything from “the West.” Shortly after World War II, my grandfather and his brothers sent a letter to Puchovichi, begging anyone who might receive it to let them know the fate of their family members under the German occupation. My father always told me that “everyone” had survived the war except his grandmother, but no one ever spoke of any details. There was little contact after that. Our Russian family, like so many others, was trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

It was the summer of 1997. I had been living in Israel since 1985 and was visiting New York with my husband and four children. Over the previous four years, my husband and I had lost three of our parents. Only my mother was still alive. When I visited with my father=s only sibling, Uncle Fred, that summer, something compelled me to ask him what he remembered about my grandfather=s family in Russia. I suppose I felt a need to connect with my ancestors now that I was fast becoming the “older generation” (even though I was only 41). He told me that he had written down everything that he knew, but he had left it in his home in Florida. He would send it to me in a couple of months when he returned there in the fall from his summer home.

Uncle Fred must have had second thoughts about putting it off. Several days later, I received a letter from him. In it he documented everything he remembered about my grandfather=s family and shtetl (village). It is the only information I ever received from him. He died a few months later, and my aunt has never been able to locate the records he mentioned. Somehow, I knew that this letter would be important to me one day, but when I returned home to my busy life in Israel, I put it aside and forgot about it.

Fast forward to 2003. In 2001, I had been swept up in the rapidly expanding worldwide interest in Jewish genealogy and had taken a beginner=s course offered by an Israeli group. I was hooked. I discovered that my cousin, Paul Klein, had done a remarkable job of researching my grandmother=s family back in the 1980s, so I concentrated on my grandfather=s family. I signed up with JewishGen and the Belarus SIG. I checked out websites of interest to Jewish genealogists. I constructed a family tree with the facts as I knew them, but there were many gaps. My sister Diane and I discussed the possibility of hiring a researcher, but that=s all we didCtalk. In the summer of 2002, we visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. There we learned for the first time details about the murder of the Jews in the Minsk ghetto and in the surrounding countryside. We realized that the chances that every member of my grandfather=s family had escaped the Nazi occupation were very slim. There were many “actions” in the vicinity of their small town of Puchovichi. Many townspeople had been murdered in mass shootings, though some had escaped to the east. This realization led me to think that I might find some information at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

In January 2003, the Jewish Family Research Association of Israel (JFRA) organized a field trip to Yad Vashem. This time I was determined not to miss my chance to discover some clues about my family. I promptly signed up to join them. At that time, Yad Vashem=s collection of Pages of Testimony was not yet available on the Internet, as it is today. The only way to reference them was at Yad Vashem=s Reference and Information Services Unit. Pages of Testimony are filled out by Holocaust survivors to commemorate their murdered loved ones and kept in the Hall of Names at the museum.

When I sat down in front of one of Yad Vashem=s computers, I had little hope of finding any Pages of Testimony about my family. After all, according to my father, the family had survived by escaping to the east ahead of the advancing Germans. My uncle had told me that my grandfather=s sister was named Elke, that she was married to Shimshe Rusinov and that she had several children, one of them a daughter. One of the Russian-speaking librarians helped me type in this information. We waited while the specially designed program conducted its search. Imagine my shock when not one but two Pages of Testimony seemed to fit the criteria. We had a match. One Page of Testimony had been submitted in 1992 by Sonya Rusinova in memory of her brother Felix (Faivel), son of Elke Idelchik and Shimshe Rusinov of Puchovichi, Belarus. Felix had died fighting the Germans in the Red Army in 1941. My Uncle Fred and Felix shared the same Hebrew name, Faivel. Apparently, they were both named after the same great-grandfather. I was certain that this young man had been my father=s first cousin. But, excited as I was, there was a problem. How was I to find Sonya Rusinova in Minsk? What if she had since moved or, worse yet, died? I didn’t know how to begin, so I turned my attention to the second Page of Testimony which had been submitted by a Mina Zibitsker in memory of her brother Daniel Idelchik of Puchovichi, son of Moshe Idelchik and Basya Moroshek. Daniel also had died fighting in the Red Army. My Uncle Fred had not provided any details at all about my grandfather=s brother, Moshe. I did not know his wife=s name or how many children he had, let alone their names. But, Mina Zibitsker was living in Chicago, Illinois, at the time that she had submitted the Page of Testimony. Maybe she was still there.

Only an address had been provided, so I quickly called Chicago directory information. It had a telephone number for a family named Zibitsker still at the same address. Could I have found my long lost family at last? My heart was pounding, but I picked up the phone and dialed. The telephone was answered by an elderly man who spoke halting but understandable English. I told him that I was looking for the family of Moshe Idelchik from Puchovichi. I mentioned the names of Moshe=s parents (my great-grandparents). It quickly became clear to me that I had found my family.

Ilya Zibitsker, Moshe=s son-in-law, had also grown up in Puchovichi. He had known his wife Mina=s family all of his life. Mina had been my father=s first cousin. I was very saddened to learn that she had died the previous year. But Ilya and Mina had a son, Boris, and a daughter, Natalie, who were also living with their families in Chicago. They are our second cousins. When I got off the phone with Ilya, I immediately called my sister in New Jersey. She couldn’t believe that I had found our lost family in Chicago! Even more amazing was the fact that they had been living there since 1979, when my grandfather was still alive. Diane immediately called Natalie and spoke with her at length. We made plans for a visit as soon as possible.

In the meantime, Ilya had provided me with Sonya Rusinova’s telephone number in St. Petersburg, where she now lived. Sonya has a younger brother, Lova, and Mina has a half-brother, Grigory, and a half-sister, Ludmilla. They now live in Germany with their families. Sonya=s brothers, Gregory and Boris, both died in the late 1990s. My Russian cousins had grown up together and had remained close even after Mina had immigrated to Chicago to be near her children. My only problem was finding a way to communicate with Sonya, since we didn’t share a common language.

I asked my friend, Svetlana, who speaks fluent Russian and Hebrew, to act as translator. She called Sonya to introduce me. Ilya had already called her from Chicago. She was very excited to hear from me, but wary of being disappointed. She asked me to send photographs and a letter telling her about our family. As soon as she saw a picture of my Grandpa Charles, she knew he was her long-lost uncle. The family resemblance was remarkable. She quickly sent back photographs to me. I had seen a picture of my great-grandparents that my grandfather had displayed in his home, but it had disappeared when he died. This exchange of family photographs was very emotional for me. I now had in my possession pictures of my great-grandmother Chana (for whom I am named) and great-grandfather Shimon, one of the few photographs that had survived World War II and the German occupation.

My sister and I were not satisfied with a mere exchange of letters. We wanted to meet these newfound cousins. A few months later, Diane flew from her home in New Jersey to Chicago where she met Ilya, Natalie, Boris and their families. They called me from there so I could be a part of it as well. In October of 2005, Lova Rusinov, the youngest and only surviving brother of Sonya, came to Israel from his home in Germany for a week-long vacation at the Dead Sea. My husband, Bob, and I traveled there to meet him. This was the little boy in all the old family photos taken in Puchovichi.

In the summer of 2006, Diane and I flew with my husband to San Diego (to where Natalie and her husband, Leo, and her son, Alex, and his family had recently relocated). After three years, I was finally able to meet my cousin, Natalie. We hit it off right away and spent a lovely few days visiting with them. Before we left, Diane and I were already planning another trip, this time to Russia to meet Sonya and her family. We settled on early September 2007 and told Sonya that we were coming. As the time drew near, we collected photographs and mementos that we wanted to share and bought gifts to bring with us. Diane flew to Israel to meet me, and from there we boarded a plane bound for St. Petersburg. We couldn’t help but feel the impact of this tripCfrom Russia to New York to Tel Aviv and back to Russia again. It had taken just under one hundred years for the Russian and American branches of the family to unite once again on Russian soil. My grandfather could never have imagined in 1908 that such a thing would one day be possibleCthat his grandchildren would be able to return to Russia, flying in less than five hours from our national homeland to meet his family.

We had arranged in advance for a translator to accompany us to Sonya=s home on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. She and her family welcomed us warmly. We spent several emotional hours talking, asking questions and sharing photos. There was so much to say and not enough time to say it all. We met Sonya=s 92-year-old husband, Peter Cherno, who lost 19 members of his immediate family during the Holocaust, but wore his Red Army medal proudly on his lapel. We met Sonya=s grandson, Martin, and his sister, Sascha, who live with Sonya along with their mother and father. Sonya=s son, Yascha, lives and works in Moscow during the week and travels home each weekend. We met him later in Moscow and were again amazed by his resemblance to our father. It was interesting, too, to note our own resemblance to these previously unknown family members. In the final analysis, isn’t that what genealogy is all aboutC filling in the blanks, finding the missing pieces of the puzzle, reconnecting with the whole of our family history and, best of all, finding living, breathing relatives that complete our own story in some way.

Avotaynu 2007; 23(4):37-39

DOI: 10.17228/AVOT20070437
Copyright © 2008 Avotaynu, Inc.